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“The operation would still be regulated by the FAA. It has nothing to do with safety whatsoever,” said Parker, who said other countries have made similar switches without affecting aviation safety. “What it’s about is about being much more efficient and having much fewer delays, much lower flight times.”

Parker said making the change would free the air traffic control system from the cycle of annual congressional appropriations that make it difficult to plan for long-term investments — such as the shift from ground-based radars to satellite technology for tracking aircraft.

President Trump often sounds off about America’s terrible roads or “third-world airports,” and he’s landed on one excellent idea: Spinning off air-traffic control from the Federal Aviation Administration. A new report explains how this could bring innovation and efficiency to airspace that the federal government is struggling to manage.

Mr. Trump’s budget proposes converting the FAA’s air-traffic outfit into “an independent, non-governmental organization,” as Canada has done, and dozens of other countries have similar models. House Transportation Chairman Bill Shuster last year introduced a bill to turn air-traffic control over to a nonprofit corporation run by a board with seats for airlines, the pilot’s union, hobbyist aviators and more, but it stalled without presidential support.

Pilots currently bounce from one radio point to the next, which can result in roundabout routes and wasted fuel. The Transportation Department’s Inspector General airdrops the occasional damning report on FAA’s NextGen modernization program, whose “total costs and timelines remain unclear,” according to the November installment. FAA may finish the project a decade after the 2025 deadline—or 20 years after its technology is obsolete.

If the effort to privatize more than 30,000 Federal Aviation Administration workers is successful this year, it will be the result of issues like the paper strips.

Each time an air traffic controller transfers responsibility for a plane to a colleague, the handoff is quite literal. He hands a narrow strip of paper with the plane’s information on it to the fellow controller.

“We are at least eight years away from replacing this paper-strip system,” former transportation secretary James H. Burnley said Tuesday.